Last week I discussed standards. If you haven’t checked that out I’d highly recommend giving it a read as we’re going to build off of that today.

As I was writing out that article it became very apparent to me that in order to create the standards and systems one needs to create the life of their dreams - they must actually envision the life of their dreams.

There is so much depth behind creating a vision for your life that I couldn’t possibly fit it all in one article, so we’ll be continually building on this topic for a few months.

During this past week I had a couple calls that really opened my eyes to how important creating a vision is.

I was talking to a couple of my buddies who were in a bit of a rut.

The ones where you just sort of go through the motions. When you wake up and feel uninspired.

You start to default back to the bare minimum inputs you need to sustain your current outputs, and just sort of get by.

I’ve felt this feeling myself multiple times, and it was always a struggle to get out of this state of mind.

But after doing so over and over I started to understand why it is that we fall into these ruts.

The first step is becoming aware.

Most of us go our entire lives just going through the motions and rarely ever consciously thinking about our decisions.

There’s a great book called “Breaking the habit of being yourself” by Dr. Joe Dispenza that goes into how and why we automate certain tasks and behaviors.

But in order for us to start becoming aware of our actions and thoughts, we must first become aware.

Awareness begets awareness.

This is a habit you must practice and train over time.

Every time you make a decision or a thought pops in your head ask yourself what the meaning of that thought is.

Does it stem from insecurity?

Does it come from jealousy?

Another way to do this is to set an alarm on your phone to go over every 2 hours and when the alarm goes off jot down what’s on your mind so you can start seeing your actions and thoughts easier.

After we have become conscious and wrote down our thoughts and actions over a week or two - we can start to create our anti-vision.

Simply put, anti-vision is where we don’t want to end up. It’s what will happen if we keep doing what we’re doing and we don’t change.

Examine your actions and your thoughts and see where they will lead you in 5-10 years if you don’t make any changes.

This should do 2 things:

When you’re writing out your anti-vision don’t be vague.

Write out exactly what your day looks like, how you feel, how your relationships are. Go into detail, make it feel like it’s really happening.

Once you have our anti-vision we can create our vision a bit easier.

Our vision is what we want our life to become. What we want to grow into.

There’s 2 important things you need to keep in mind while writing out your vision:

Now why should we not focus on material things?

When you see someone in that mansion, or in that nice car, chances are that you don’t necessarily want those things - you want the experience those things provide.

You want security, you want adrenaline pumping fun.

And yes you I do think you should envision what your house will look like, but focus more on the experience and the feeling those things will provide.

Once we can feel those emotions, we’re bringing that future event into the now.

The same way when we think back to a bad break up we’re bringing that pain and that memory into the now.

Now we are starting to create a map to the future, and your subconscious mind will start connecting the dots in order to get there.

Let’s summarize what we’ve talked about.

Our first step is to become aware of what we’re doing right now.

Ask yourself what is the root cause of this feeling or action I’m taking. Our goal here is to establish our baseline and understand what it is we’re currently doing.

From there we create our anti-vision. Where do we end up in 5-10 years if we don’t make any changes. Is that place where we want to be?

Make sure to dive deep into this and make it real.

Once we have what we don’t want, we can create what we want.

Write out what your ideal life looks like. Where is it that you live? What does your average day look like? What emotions and feelings do you primarily want to feel during these days?

Make sure to make this crystal clear as well and spend 5 minutes everyday thinking about your vision.

Your vision will likely change and evolve over time and that’s okay. A we grow and have new experiences we realize we may not want what we thought we did.

Iterate on your vision overtime.

There’s so much depth to uncover still, and we’ll dive deeper into them with time - but I hope this gave you a framework to start creating a clearer vision for your life.

Pair this up with the standards and systems we talked about last week and your off to building a solid foundation for the rest of your life.

If this helped you out in any way it’d be much appreciated if you shared this with someone close to you.

Also if you want daily content I recommend checking out my Twitter as I’m posting on there every single day.

If you prefer to listen to audio rather than read you should check out The Project Self Podcast to hear to audio version of this article.

- Kellsey